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Report
A Neoclassical Model of the World Financial Cycle
Emerging markets face large and persistent fluctuations in sovereign spreads. To what extent are these fluctuations driven by local shocks versus financial conditions in advanced economies? To answer this question, we develop a neoclassical business cycle model of a world economy with an advanced country, the North, and many emerging market economies, the South. Northern households invest in domestic stocks, domestic defaultable bonds, and international sovereign debt. Over the 2008-2016 period, the global cycle phase, the North accounts for 68% of Southern spreads’ fluctuations. Over the ...
Working Paper
Deconstructing Delays in Sovereign Debt Restructuring
Negotiations to restructure sovereign debt are time consuming, taking almost a decade on average to resolve. In this paper, we analyze a class of widely used complete information models of delays in sovereign debt restructuring and show that, despite superficial similarities, there are major differences across models in the driving force for equilibrium delay, the circumstances in which delay occurs, and the efficiency of the debt restructuring process. We focus on three key assumptions. First, if delay has a permanent effect on economic activity in the defaulting country, equilibrium delay ...
Working Paper
Domestic Policies and Sovereign Default
A model with two essential elements, sovereign default and distortionary fiscal and monetary policies, explains the interaction between sovereign debt, default risk and inflation in emerging countries. We derive conditions under which monetary policy is actively used to support fiscal policy and characterize the intertemporal tradeoffs that determine the choice of debt. We show that in response to adverse shocks to the terms of trade or productivity, governments reduce debt and deficits, and increase inflation and currency depreciation rates, matching the patterns observed in the data for ...
Working Paper
International Reserve Management under Rollover Crises
This paper investigates how a government should manage international reserves when it faces the risk of a rollover crisis. We ask, should the government accumulate reserves or reduce debt to make itself less vulnerable? We show that the optimal policy entails initially reducing debt, followed by a subsequent increase in both debt and reserves as the government approaches a safe zone. Furthermore, we uncover that issuing additional debt to accumulate reserves can lead to a reduction in sovereign spreads.
Report
Fiscal Policy in Debt Constrained Economies
We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk and limited commitment to tax plans. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the tax on labor goes to zero in the long run, while the tax on capital income may be non-zero, reversing the standard prediction of the Ramsey tax literature. The zero labor tax is an optimal long run outcome if the economy is subject to sovereign debt constraints and ...
Report
Deadly Debt Crises: COVID-19 in Emerging Markets
The COVID-19 epidemic in emerging markets risks a combined health, economic, and debt crisis. We integrate a standard epidemiology model into a sovereign default model and study how default risk impacts the ability of these countries to respond to the epidemic. Lockdown policies are useful for alleviating the health crisis but they carry large economic costs and can generate costly and prolonged debt crises. The possibility of lockdown induced debt crises in turn results in less aggressive lockdowns and a more severe health crisis. We find that the social value of debt relief can be ...
Journal Article
What We Learn from a Sovereign Debt Restructuring in France in 1721
A debt is a promise to perform a certain action (make a payment) in the future. A default is a failure to perform the action when the time comes to do so. If performance of the action were always in my interest, the promise to perform it would be superfluous. When we promise to do something, it is precisely because we may well not want to do it. Debt usually takes the form of a contract, which courts can enforce. But sovereign debt (debt issued by governments) is harder to enforce, because governments aren?t easily constrained by courts. How can sovereign governments make promises and be ...
Working Paper
Policy Rules and Large Crises in Emerging Markets
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Latin American countries temporarily suspended rules limiting debt, fiscal and monetary policies. Despite this increase in flexibility, the crisis implied a substantial deterioration of macroeconomic variables (e.g., real GDP declined by 9.5%) and high welfare costs (which we estimate as equivalent to a 13% one-time reduction in non-tradable consumption). This paper studies a sovereign default model with fiscal and monetary policies to assess the policy response and evaluate the gains from flexibility in times of severe distress.